Unable to boot XP from new hard drive

Just purchased a Western Digital 80 GB 7200 RPM HD and want to add as master HD on a 5 year old Compaq Presario 7360. Computer has a 500mhz AMD K6, a 10GB hard drive and 352 MB ram (just installed also).

I first followed instructions and software that came with new drive. Sucessfully added new disk as slave drive and copied all files. However, XP recognized new disk as 3 separate disks (in "My Computer") assigning 3 different letters to it(appear to be limited to 32MB). When trying to re-install as master drive, computer asked to "remove floppy or media and try again" during startup after I switched jumpers and cable positions on the drives. Computer would not load any further. IDE translation is Enabled in BIOS. Don't know what else I can do. Do I just need to buy a new computer or can I boot from this disk?

TIA.

 

Hi'

How did you copy the files? It sounds like there are 3 different partitions on the drive. You could reinstall Xp on the new drive if you don't mind losing everthing or boot from the original drive and reformat the new drive with WD software. WD has software you can mirror the orginal drive to the new drive and make it bootable, then change jumpers on both drives and boot from the new one.

Rick

 

Rick,

Thank you for replying.
I copied the new disk with the WD software and it looked like everything copied fine until I saw the three separate disks. The software must have partitioned it that way. I'm thinking I'm going to have to reformat the disk and try again. Maybe I chose to use FAT32 and should have used NTFS? The other weird thing that happened was that after WD was done copying, the "custom instructions" told me to move my CD-RW drive to slave (instead of saying move the old HD) and the WD drive to master. They're not even on the same cable so I don't understand. Could channel wires be crossed somewhere on the board? I don't know why it's telling me to remove floppys/media when there are none in the disk drives either.
So, in addition to the questions above I guess I have a couple others. If the above doesn't work, could it be a BIOS issue? If so, Compaq doesn't have any updates for my model with XP as the OS, but they do have updates for 98 and Me. Would it hurt to update the BIOS even though I'm running a different OS?
If THAT doesn't work, the new disk seems to run fine in slave. Given that the processor is 500mhz and the old drive is 5400 rpm, would this computer be much improvement over the old system if I just upgrade the RAM from 192 to 384 and leave the new drive in slave just for storage? Or should I just buy a Dimension 3000 for $600?

Again, thank you for your help.

Kevin

 

Seems like WD software didn't work so well, the board can't cross the channels and I can't see it having anything to do with a bios update.
Well here's what I would do if the old drive is ok and you can retrieve your data from it later.

Install the WD drive on ide 1 with jumper set at master, remove the old drive for now. In bios set the boot first boot device to cdrom the put your Xp disk in, follow the instructions and let xp format and partition the drive to NTFS, then let windows install.

If you have a upgrade version of XP at some point it will ask you for a previous version of windows and you will have to put in a windows 98 or ME cd to verify.

Caution A restore disk that typically comes with a Compaq won't work only a 98 or ME disk will. If you only have a restore disk the you will have to install 98 or me from it and then run the XP disk from within windows to install XP. Then install the old drive as a slave and get your data and use it for backup.

As far as the Dell, in my experiance working with brand name computers, Dell is better than most but not very good compared to a custome build. If it were me I would consider building a AMD based system.

Rick

 

Thanks for the advice. I'll give it a shot tomorrow.